Authors
Jana Evans Braziel
Publication date
2005
Pages
110-126
Publisher
na
Description
MAJOR DENNIS PLUNKETT, a wounded and retired soldier in the Queen's Army, settles in the Caribbean island of St. Lucia and spends his days pigfarming and ruminating on the lost Empire. So his narrative unfolds in Derek Walcott's Omeros, but his is only one of myriad tales to be told in this sprawling epic poem. 1 I open with an epigraphic quotation from Omeros in order to foreground Walcott's" martini" metaphor and its mixing of an analytical problematic that is political and ecological, postcolonial and ecocritical in nature. In the passage, we see a waning era through Plunkett's mind's eye as he sips dry gin and reflects on colonies and empires. Drinking a" Beefeater's gin," the major sardonically notes that" history" can be read in stiff cocktails, where British colonials conquered territory, dominated nature, and subdued natives." We helped ourselves," Plunkett says," to these green islands like olives from a saucer," and when they had consumed the natural resources, the colonials" spat their sucked stones on a plate"(30). I foreground this passage for two reasons: first, it reveals that environmental damage and colonialism are interlocking systems of domination in the Caribbean; and second, it underscores the imbrications of colonialism and consumption that marked the expansion of the British colonial empire in the region. Mimi Sheller has persuasively argued that representations of nature in the Caribbean historically have been tied to economies of consumption and colonization. She contends that" the invention of Caribbean nature has in turn been read onto the bodies of Caribbean peoples, implicating them in a sexualized
Total citations
200720082009201020112012201320142015201620172018201920202021202220233212333424339312